


Taxicab

by nimblermortal



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Identity, Mathematics, Worldbuilding, individuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 06:16:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5573959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Escorting a mathematician from a university to a transport should not be an Empire-shaking assignment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taxicab

RK-1729 was dispatched for escort duty to an influential academic. It was not the most exciting assignment, but it beat cafeteria duty and meant she would actually get to wear the uniform they all trained in. It also, as it turned out, changed her life.

Her squad members had teased her for her enthusiasm - she alone had researched Siolo’olgkru and found she was an academic on loan from a university on Ryloth. Whatever she was on loan for was important enough for a detachment of Stormtroopers to prevent any Resistance fighters who might, for some reason, think it important to intercept custody of a mathematician.

What exactly Siolo’olgkru studied was also well beyond RK-1729’s ability to understand. RK-1729 had, with some trepidation, puzzled out the words associated with the Twi’lek woman’s research. Then she had given up and matched the name of the university to the name of the place where they would be picking Siolo’olgkru up.

Since a mathematician did not merit an officer and no one else had bothered to do any research, the squad cheerfully elected RK-1729 as their spokestrooper. This was only advantageous insofar as RK-1729 knew, when they arrived at Siolo’olgkru’s office, not to call her Professor Olgkru; but it did seem to make a difference.

“Ah, Stormtroopers,” said Siolo’olgkru, opening the door. It was wooden and manual. Much of the university was. The detachment had nearly walked into the first door they came across, much to the amusement of the students. “It was very courteous of you to use my full name; who do I have to thank for that?”

“Professor Siolo’olgkru, if you would come this way,” said RK-1729, gesturing and trying not to sound embarrassed.

“Not so fast,” said Siolo’olkgkru, and looked over RK-1729’s shoulder. “There’s six of you, are there? Then you can carry my books.”

“Books?” RK-1729 repeated, and Siolo’olgkru opened the door the whole way to reveal a stack of crates and a rather harassed young Twi’lek man standing among them with an obsolete rectangular prism in each hand. If the crates were full of these, the office must have held a fortune in antiques.

“All this would fit on one data chip,” said RK-1729.

“And if your leader wants it to fit on one data chip, he can find another mathematician,” said Siolo’olgkru, her soft voice steely. “I’m sure it’s quite easy to find experts on…”

The roll of syllables that fell off her tongue next bore a passing resemblance to the words RK-1729 had sounded out in her quarters, but they remained completely unintelligible. RK-1729 stared politely at the conservatively clad Twi’lek and waited for the sound to stop.

“I’d go,” said the young man amid the books. There was a sudden sound of blasters being raised in his direction. He abruptly raised his books in a gesture of surrender. “Are they always this jumpy?”

“It will be an adventure,” said Siolo’olgkru, and turned back to the Stormtroopers. “This is my protegé, Chom’olgkru. He will instruct you in how to transport and care for the books.”

“We have a departure time at 15.97 local,” said RK-1729.

“Then you’d better stop standing around,” said Siolo’olgkru, and leaned back against the desk as she watched RK-1729’s crew be instructed in the fine art of picking up boxes. They were about to leave when she gestured and Chom’olgkru scooped the box from RK-1729’s hands.

“I can carry that,” he said, and just as quickly dropped back to pester RK-1880 about every detail of Stormtrooper life. RK-1729 was pleased to escape this fate; he refused to be ignored, and she did not want to have to admit that, in her experience, much of the glory of a Stormtrooper career lay at the bottom of a pan someone else had burnt csolcir in.

“You know my name and my student’s,” said Siolo’olgkru, claiming a spot next to RK1729 at the head of the troop. “What is yours?”

“My designation is RK-1729.”

Unlike every single other citizen that RK-1729 had ever encountered, Siolo’olgkru seemed unfazed by this. It prompted RK-1729 to volunteer, tentatively, that Stormtrooper designations were not as meaningful as Twi’lek names.

Siolo’olgkru stopped dead in the middle of the hallway. “Not as meaningful?” she repeated. “ _Not as meaningful?_ You have the nerve to stand in the mathematics department of my university with a designation like RK-1729 and declare it _not meaningful?_ ”

This, RK-1729 decided, was exactly why they were instructed not to speak to civilians.

“Your pardon, Professor,” she said, and gestured along their path.

“Hundreds of years ago the mathematician Ramsr Komero entertained a visiting colleague who posed him the challenge of trying to find significance in the number of the taxi he had taken to Komero’s house that day, describing it as ‘rather a dull number and hopefully not an unfavorable one’. Komero replied that it was in fact a _very_ interesting number - the smallest possible number expressible as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways. Do you have any idea what that number was?”

“1729?” RK-1729 guessed meekly.

“Indubitably. And you stand here, with a designation exactly matching both that number and Ramsr Komero’s initials, and tell me that it is meaningless? Young woman, you stand at a turning point of history.”

RK-1729 recalled, rather belatedly, that some old-fashioned Twi’lek considered coincidence to be indicative of significance; and as such, a woman who could find significance in any number around her had to be something of a priestess, if she kept up such old ways. Which, given how conservative Siolo’olgkru had proved herself in other respects, seemed rather probable.

“I apologize for the offense,” she said, and gestured again. “We have a shuttle departure…”

Siolo’olgkru stared at her for some time from her position of regal bearing, and then turned without acknowledging the statement and swept ahead of RK-1729 to lead the way to the shuttle. Whatever concessions RK-1729 had won by using the correct address, she had certainly lost them all. She followed meekly in Siolo’olgkru’s wake, leading a line of Stormtroopers carrying crates of books, and found herself twitching her fingers sporadically as she tried to calculate the cubes whose sum formed 1729.

No one but Chom’olgkru spoke for the rest of the voyage. It was not long; the shuttle broke atmosphere and docked with the waiting transport almost as quickly as a military vehicle might have. The five Stormtroopers and Chom’olgkru filed out of the shuttle in the reverse order they had entered it, and only Siolo’olgkru’s raised hand kept RK-1729 from following.

“Well?” she asked. “Did you figure out the cubes?”

“10, 9, 12, and 1,” RK-1729 said. She might have read them off her helmet’s screen. She might have. Siolo’olgkru was still waiting. As RK-1729 watched, her hand fell, and there was only space between them and the transport. Siolo’olgkru lifted one foot, as deliberate as any dancer, to step onto it.

“The time of the shuttle launch?” RK-1729 blurted. Siolo’olgkru smiled.

“I’ll get you a book.”

 

When they left the shuttle, RK-1729 was holding a book, a ridiculous paper luxury fine-printed with ludicrous mathematical foibles, useless relations between numbers and a picture of an unfolding lotus on the frontispiece. Her squad-mates jeered at her for it, and she was sent right back to the kitchens with a warning about reconditioning.

But even Stormtroopers needed downtime, and mathematics, unlike poetry, was not forbidden. RK-1729 took the book to her quarters and tapped RK-1597 on the shoulder.

“We had a launch time that was precisely your number today,” she said.

“So?” asked RK-1597. He was used to RK-1729 making such observations, as if the coincidence of a set of coordinates containing someone’s designation number was worthy of note instead of a probabilistic inevitability.

“Well, according to this book, that’s the very first four-digit number in the sequence devised by Bon Le,” said RK-1729. “It’s a sequence that builds on every number that came before it and expands ever outward in a spiral, and it shows how the shells of lost Alderaan coiled, and how the storms on Tatooine spiral, and how the cells in clones on Kamino redouble.”

“All that in one number?” RK-1597 asked, starting to sound interested.

“It means 1597 means something,” said RK-1729, whose name meant _Prophecy Through Coincidence_. “It means life, and expansion, and - and aerodynamic form.”

Stormtroopers were not taught words like _beauty_ , but they tended to reach a consensus about approximations for the concept.

“They knew about this when people were still writing in _books_?” RK-1597 asked. “Never mind - do RK-1880.”

It was well known that RK-1597 had a crush on RK-1880, so RK-1729 had been prepared for this question. She smiled smugly and settled on the edge of RK-1597’s bunk, flipping back through the book.

“This is a diagram of Pytas Pytsam’s proof about how the numbers of a triangle are squares…” she began.

RK-1597 told RK-1880 the next morning at breakfast that his name meant _Joy in Company_. It was a game to pass the time, passed off as a way of sharpening the mathematics skills that honed their targeting. They kept it quiet anyway, only telling those who could keep a secret, because while it was not forbidden, there was certainly something wrong with carving an identity out of the crude numbers, one that ripped their unity from them and gave them names like _Freedom Through Imagination._

They shared the names anyway. They could not do otherwise. There was too much to be gained in knowing oneself as a being, separate and valuable.

It did not spread fast enough. When a tie fighter exploded unauthorized from the bay of a ship across the galaxy, no one there knew that FN-2187 was _Identity of Comprision_ , and he did not know that he had held FN-1414 ( _Faith in the Irrational_ ) bleeding in his arms, or that the trooper he stabbed was FN-1260, _The Whole is Greater than the Parts_.

But if nothing had changed, if no one had escaped, there would still have come a day when a Stormtrooper would give his designation as RK-3141, and be offered the name Rick, and stand astonished as he said, “No, my name means Steadfast, and I won’t accept another.”

**Author's Note:**

>  **Note:** Some time before 27 December 2016, the links below broke. My distracted attempt to fix them hasn't yielded fruit yet, so I am updating to put the links in text form after the paragraph, and will fix them properly when I hear back from tech support.
> 
> All mathematicians mentioned are real people with Star Wars names generated with this. This is distorted insofar as two of them only have one name, no known mother’s name, and dubious birthplaces. Nevertheless:  
> Ramsr Komeros - Srinivasa Ramanujan, taxi cab numbers  
> Bon Le - Fibonacci  
> Pytas Pytsam - Pythagoras  
> ('this' link: http://fergytech.com/social/star-wars-name-generator/)
> 
>  **1729** ’s name is explained in-story, as is **1597** ’s.  
>  **1880** is a happy number, meaning that if you take each of its digits, square them, add those squares to each other, and repeat the process with the result, you will eventually get to 1. It is also a triplet, meaning part of a triad of whole numbers that form the sides of a right triangle (such as 3, 4, 5). Source does not list 1880’s fellow triplets. Since it is a happy number and three’s company, I interpreted this as _Joy Through Company_.  
>  ('Source' link: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HappyNumber.html)  
>  **2718** is the first four digits of the number _e_ (2.718281828459…). It’s the base of the natural log, and there are many cool things about it (it’s my favorite constant), one of which is that if you raise it to an imaginary power, you can get trig functions - and through them, by a process of Fourier approximation, literally any function. I interpreted this as _Freedom Through Imagination_.  
>  **3141** is recognizable as the first four digits of π (3.14159…), which of course describes a circle. Since this is something that consistently comes back to where it started, with a constant radius, I took the complimentary interpretation of _Steadfast_.  
>  **2187** is a  vampire number . There are a lot of directions I could go with this, but I was aiming for one that would imply that Finn is strong in many ways, and the way he arranges them determines what that means.  
>  ('vampire number' link: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/VampireNumber.html)  
>  **1414** is the beginning of √ 2, which is the easiest number to prove is not rational.  
>  **1260** is another vampire number (21*60 = 1260), because this binds the corpse even more closely to Finn, but it’s also one in which 12*5 = 60, so the constituent parts are even more closely bound.  
>  All of these are, as stated, interpretations - so depending on who did the reading, 3141 on one ship might mean _Steadfast_ where on another it would mean _All-Encompassing_.


End file.
